Migration

After traveling the 3 kilometers to the border, the Laguna Larga community arrived in Campeche, Mexico. There, the refugees were met by the Mexican Nacional Institute of Migration (INM) and armed federal and state police who had been informed days before of the impending eviction by the Guatemalan authorities. Barred from entering further into Mexico, the villagers were forced to stay in makeshift tents made from plastic bags on the 8-meter border zone between Campeche and El Petén.

The Miami meeting ignored human rights and refugee rights. There appears to have been no discussion of government abuses as a result of intensified joint operations to stop migrant flows to the United States, particularly by Mexican security forces and increasingly by Central American forces charged with controlling outmigration of their own people.

Mexico’s Secretaries of Government and Foreign Relations and Defense and Marine Secretariats will stand beside their U.S. co-hosts June 15 and 16 to launch the new Plan Pentagon for Central America. They won’t call it that, of course. Vice President Mike Pence will open the event “Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America”, before the presidents, the generals and representatives from observer countries.

This viacrucis, or Stations of the Cross, was made up of about 300 migrants, including women and children, who traveled through Mexico, ending up in Mexico City. According to one of its communiqués, its fundamental purpose is “to escape the southern border, which has condemned many people without papers to precarious work, discrimination and the absence of state protection.”

The Caravan Against Fear set out from Sacramento April 10 in eight white vans that carried some fifty people, most of us strangers before the trip. We traced the border from California to Texas and back again, and learned about friendship, solidarity and resistance on the border of Trump America.

May Day is a transnational event in the Paso del Norte borderlands of El Paso-Ciudad Juarez-southern New Mexico. At this year’s demonstrations, U.S. and Mexican activists joined together to denounce Trump administration immigration policies, current and looming wars, Peña Nieto administration economic and labor reforms, femicides, the forced disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa college students, attacks on workers, and Mexico’s pending internal security law.